Part 5

"Then I gathered the elements of what people call my symbolism. I do not understand anything about long words and theories. But I am willing to be a symbolist, if that defines the ideas that Michael Angelo gave me, namely that the essence of sculpture is the modelling, the general scheme which alone enables us to render the intensity, the supple variety of movement and character. If we can imagine the thought of God in creating the world, He thought first of the construction, which is the sole principle of nature, of living things and perhaps of the planets. Michael Angelo seems to me rather to derive from Donatello than from the ancients; Raphael proceeds from them. He understood that an architecture can be built up with the human body, and that, in order to possess volume and harmony, a statue or a group ought to be contained in a cube, a pyramid; or some simple figure. Let us look at a Dutch interior and at an interior painted by an artist of the present day. The latter no longer touches us, because it does not possess the qualities of depth and volume, the science of distances. The artist who paints it does not know how to reproduce a cube. An interior by Van der Meer is a cubic painting. The atmosphere is in it and the exact volume of the objects; the place of these objects has been respected, the modern painter places them, arranges them as models. The Dutchmen did not touch them, but set themselves to render the distances that separated them, that is, the depth. And then, if I go so far as to say that _cubic truth, not appearance, is the mistress of things,_ if I add that the sight of the plains and woods and country views gives me the principle of the plans that I employ on my statues, that I feel cubic truth everywhere, and that plan and volume appear to me as laws of all life and all beauty, will it be said that I am a symbolist, that I generalise, that I am a metaphysician? It seems to me that I have remained a sculptor and a realist. Unity oppresses and haunts me."

"What," says Rodin again, "is the principle of my figures, and what is it that people like in them? It is the very pivot of art, it is balance; that is to say, the oppositions of volume produced by movement. That is the striking, material fact in art, with all due deference to those persons who conceive art as distinct from 'brutal' reality. Art is like love. For many people it is a dream, a psychological complication, a palace, a perfume, a stage scene; but nothing of the sort! The essential of love is the pairing; all the rest is only detail, charming, and full of passion, but detail. It is the same in art: people come and praise my symbols and my expressions to me; but I know that the plans are the essential thing. Respect the plan, make it exact from every point; movement intervenes, displaces these volumes and creates a fresh balance. The human body is like a _walking temple,_ and like a temple it has a central point around which the volumes place and spread themselves. When one understands that, one has everything. It is simple, but it must be seen, and academism refuses to see it. Instead of recognising that that is the key to my method they prefer to say that I am a poet. That expression signifies that people feel, confusedly, the difference between an art resting on conventions and one derived from truth; only they think that the 'poetic' art is the conventional one. They call that _inspiration._ That is the belief that has led to the theory of genius being madness. But men of genius are just those _who, by their trade-skill, carry the essential thing to perfection._ People say that my sculpture _is that of an 'exalté.'[5]_

"I do not deny that there is exaltation in my works; but that exaltation existed not in me, but in nature, in movement. The divine work is naturally exalted. As for me, all I do is to be true; my temperament is not 'exalted'; it is patient. I am not a dreamer, but a mathematician; and if my sculpture is good it is because it is geometrical."

From these fragments of conversation the reader will conceive how Rodin's generalising spirit leads him from the realism of his daily work to the synthesis of a sort of ideo-realistic metaphysical system. He has the sense (belonging only to genius) of the _continuity of the universe_, and he certainly had it at a time when, unlettered as he was, he would not have known how to explain it specifically to himself. He constantly formulates this metaphysical system, as I have seen it formulated by Stéphane Mallarmé, who could never see anything without instantly bringing together two ideas or images that no one would ever have thought of connecting. Spontaneous analogy is the mark of genius and the secret of all real poetry. This is why I consider Rodin as a very great poet--not in the sense that he dislikes, but on the contrary, by giving to the word "poet" its deep etymological significance according to the Greek, that of "making, creating, vivifying." We may understand, too, in how great a degree an intellectuality of this kind offers a living challenge to the ideas of the "École." The man who thinks thus is necessarily isolated and has struggled all his life, never making a concession and saying nobly, "The artist, like the woman, has an honour to preserve." I will further quote from Rodin the following reflection[6]: "Where you follow nature, you get everything. When I have a beautiful woman's body for a model the drawings that I make from it give me images of insects, birds, and fishes. That seems improbable, and I had no suspicion of it myself. Formerly I used to be seeking shapes for vases, either to use them at Sèvres, where I used to work, or elsewhere.... I never succeeding in finding a beauty of proportions and lines such as I had the feeling of, because I only founded my attempts upon _imagination._ Since that time I have drawn women's bodies, and one of these bodies gave me, in the synthesis of it, a magnificent shape for a vase, with true and harmonious lines. The point is not to create. Creation and improvisation are useless words. Genius only comes to the man who understands with his eye and his brain. Everything is in the things about us. Manufacture and ornamental art want reforming according to these ideas. I should have liked to see that. Everything-is contained in nature. There is an harmonious, continual, uninterrupted movement. A woman, a mountain, a horse, in conception they are all the same thing, they are made on the same principles. Young artists compose instead of following their models and understanding that therein lies infinity." Here Rodin directly touches a scientific truth--the relative monotony of Nature's productive forms. Nature does everything with very few forms: the variations are so infinite that there are no two leaves alike, but the nerves of a leaf, the lines of a vein, an artery, a bird's wing, a fishbone, a nerve-cell, are identical; multiplicity derives from identity and returns to it, so that everything is reduced to a fundamental geometry which perhaps is but the effect of a single cellular generation. In this respect the laws of art and of science are the same, even as among all the arts there is a synthesis of common laws, an identity where we seem to behold a difference. Recent work in science, by establishing the existence of states of radiation (Crookes, Röntgen, Hertz) is busy undermining our old conception of matter, showing us the identity of it with the immaterial, and thereby abolishing our preconceptions about the idea and the fact, music and sculpture, considered as different manifestations. I remember that I one day kept Rodin's curiosity excited for a long time by explaining the details of this theory to him; he was not acquainted with it, and listened to me as to a writer in love with general ideas. But it was clear that in his mere province as a sculptor he knew far better and had penetrated far more deeply into this enthralling problem of identity. His is a luminous mind, of the same kind as the electric rays; it rather penetrates than surrounds what is obscure to it. On that day he was disturbed, and I was irritated by certain declamations which had been written about his "philosophy," and of which the author had assuredly not comprehended the logical consequences; and we came to the conclusion that it would be much better for Rodin's peace of mind to keep silent upon these points, for his "philosophy" could only be made comprehensible to those who could understand the method of his sculpture.

It is time, however, to pause in this path and to return simply to the question of sculpture. Nor was it my purpose to tire the reader by these abstractions when I began to say a few words about Rodin's opinions concerning the antique. It must be understood, then, that the _Balzac_ and even the _Hugo_, as well as some figures, were the result of all these preceding reflections. "When I saw my _Balzac_ brought into the yard from the storehouse of the statues in order to go to the Salon," says Rodin, "I had it purposely placed beside _The Kiss,_ which had been finished rather earlier. I was not dissatisfied with the simplified vigour of that group, to which I had already applied these experiments. But I saw that it looked slack, that it did not hold its place beside the _Balzac_ as Michael Angelo's torso does beside a fine antique, and then I understood that I was in the right path. I have had hesitations, you know, pangs that I do not speak of. And then, little by little, as I looked at nature, as I came to understand it better and to throw aside my prejudices more frankly, I took courage. It seemed to me that I was doing better. When I began I did skilful things, things that were smartly done, but they were thin and dry, but I felt there was something beyond, and that something is amplification. I only ventured on it when I was over fifty years old, but do you not think I have a right now to disregard the objections of the mob and the newspapers? I have taken time to know why I was doing as I did. The essential things of my modelling are there, and they would be there in less degree if I 'finished' more. As to polishing or repolishing a toe or a curl, I find no interest in it; it impairs the large line, the soul of what I desired to do, and I have nothing more to say to the public on that point. There the line of demarcation comes between the confidence that the public ought to have in me and the concessions that I ought not to make to the public." To this firm and discreet resolution Rodin has kept in all the works wrought out by him since 1898.

I cannot better set forth his opinions about the antique than by quoting the following fragments from two articles that he wrote for the _Musée_, a review of ancient art, in January and February, 1904; for Rodin sometimes writes, quite unpretentiously, but with the same lucidity of thought that he shows in his familiar conversation. One of these articles refers to a Greek statuette in the Museum of Naples, the other to the lesson that the ancients give us.

"In the first place, the Antique is Life itself. Nothing is more alive, and no style in the world has rendered life as it has. The ancients were the greatest, most serious, and most admirable observers of nature who have ever existed. The antique was able to render life because the ancients saw the essential thing in it--large blocks. They confined themselves to the large shadows cast by these large blocks, and as truth itself lies in that, their figures being so made could never be feeble. Moreover, the antique is simple, and that gives it astonishing energy. And then there is much more study in it than appears; that was brought home to me once. When I had finished my _Age of Brass_, I went to Italy and I found an Apollo whose leg was in exactly the same position as one in _The Age of Brass_ that had taken me six months' work. Then I saw that though on the surface everything seems to be done at a stroke, in reality all the muscles are built up and one sees the details come to light one by one. That is because the ancients studied everything in its successive profiles, because in any figure and every part of a figure no profile is like another; when each has been studied separately the whole appears simple and alive.

"The great error of the neo-Greek school is really this: it is not _type_ that is antique, but modelling. For want of having understood that, the neo-Greek school has produced nothing but papier-mâché. It is bad to put the antique before beginners; one should end, not begin with it. If you wanted to teach someone to eat, you would give him fresh food, that he might learn to chew; it would never occur to you to give him food already triturated to exercise his teeth upon. Well, when you want to teach sculpture to anyone, set him face to face with nature, and when he has gained plenty of power to deal with nature, then say to him: 'Now, here is what the antique has done.' And that will give him a new source of energy. Whereas if you give the antique to the beginner who has never struggled with nature, he does not understand anything about it, and loses his individuality over it. You make a plagiarist of him, and instead of making his own prayer to nature he will repeat the prayer of the antique without understanding the words of it. He will die an old pupil; he will not die a man.

"To teach the antique at the outset of a man's studies is to render the antique incomprehensible. In the first place, no one can teach the antique, it is not possible; that art of truth and simplicity cannot be taught. The sculptor works from nature, and afterwards he goes to look, in the galleries, and see how the antique rendered what he has been trying for from the life. But if he goes straight to the antique, shutting his eyes to nature, as the antique has always been done from nature, our sculptor will only be able to carry that vision into his own work in a factitious way; he will be neither antique nor modern, but bad.

"A man may do antique work in our day, not in the false sense of producing the _antique type,_ but in the true sense of _modelling like the antique._ Such a man (painter, etcher, or sculptor) will take nature, and if he has the power of the antique he will produce antique work, which will entirely disagree with what is taught as such, but will agree with that in the museums. The 'École' begins at the end; when a man begins with nature, he may go on to the most improbable inventions; the antiques themselves show that. Do you know of anything more impossible than the centaur? But is there anything finer in Olympia? The ancients knew nature so well that they became her fellow-workers and created, not phantoms, but beings that were alive in spite of physical impossibilities. To my mind it would be better not to study the antique than to study it wrong. It is not the artist's alphabet, but the reward of his work. The command which it gives us is not to copy it, but to do like it.

"To say that the antiques, which portray the plain marvel of life, are beautiful is a superficial sort of praise. Beauty is not the starting-point, but the point of arrival; a thing can only be beautiful if it is true. Truth itself is only a complete harmony, and harmony is finally only a bundle of utilities. The miracle of life could not be perpetuated but for the constant renewal of universal balance. The ancients felt that vast rhythm, and their art, being modelled upon it, appears to us as a natural and sublime expression of beauty.... One of the ancients made a statue. How did he set about it? It is useless to bring in rules that only grew up in the brains of commentators dissecting a series of works, centuries afterwards. The antique remains uncomprehended because we have not a simple enough spirit. It is not by studying the antique that we shall learn its secret; in order to understand, not its nomenclature, but its spirit, we must begin by studying nature. Rembrandt cannot be understood by copying him at the Louvre, he can only be understood when we travel through nature to him. Well, nature is always there, waiting patiently for antiques to be made afresh; the model is there waiting for someone to come at last, no matter whence. For it is an error to think the antique comes from the south: it comes from everywhere. The antique can be produced from a Dutch woman or an American woman; the type is nothing, the modelling is everything.

"What makes the strength of the antique is the plan, the connection of all the profiles. The neo-Greeks say: 'The antiques are _line,_ and their works, in which all the lines, except two, dance about, show their error. The antiques, we will say, are _lines_ or rather _plan._ Look at an antique; you can guess the full face from the profile. The eye cannot grasp the shape on the opposite side to that which it beholds, but it deduces it from this side: walk round, and the study of the profiles will afford you an _irrefragable_ proof by _rule of three._ The sculptor swells the half-tones by slight exaggerations, so as to heighten the light by a tone. The drapery lives; like the body that it hides, it receives life from that body without needing the subterfuge of wetted drapery.'[7]

"There is in the antiques an astonishing mystery of life which causes all idea of dimension to disappear. A figure an inch or two high might just as well be life-size; when a thing is well organised, the greatness is in the modelling and not in the size. If one were to photograph a Tanagra figure and the Eiffel Tower, and were to show the two photographs to some person unacquainted with either object, I am sure he would declare the Tanagra figure to be larger than the tower. A pear or an apple, from the point of view of modelling, is as large as the celestial sphere. Thus the splendour of truth is such that finding no word to render it, we have called it 'Ideal.'"

These quotations will suffice, I hope, to show Rodin's inmost thought. These judgments are implicit condemnations of the "École"; they are also definitions of his classical art, which is by no means "literary," and which is governed, even in its lyrical and tragic developments, by good sense, that is to say, by an inborn taste for balance in the midst of boldness. If I am anxious to insist so strongly upon Rodin's profound _normality_, this is, I repeat, in order to forewarn the public against the declamations of some of his untoward admirers, who reckon one of his merits to be an "originality" which they confound with that exaggeration, that emphasis and eccentricity that never mark the great artist. Whatever tragic or passionate subject a great artist may treat, to whatever height of strangeness his imagination may rise, beauty of form will, if he is, like Rodin, a master of _technique_, confer upon _t_ him an exalted and permanent serenity. Rembrandt and Delacroix come from the depth of their vastly differing worlds to meet Raphael and Watteau in that conciliatory region where we admire the great masters--and Rodin is already placed in that region.

[1] Rodin has never forgotten Falguière's loyalty at the time of _The Age of Brass_ affair.

[2] A recent example in Paris is the double statue of the chemists who invented quinine. When will people understand that a discovery of this kind, however honourable, is nevertheless quite incapable of being associated with any plastic idea? The same thing is true of the statues of Chappe and Lavoisier, flanked by instruments of telegraphy and chemistry. These are ridiculous signboards, melancholy compliments translated by a tradesman's art that renders our streets hideous.

[3] _Revue des Revues_ (of Paris), June 15th, 1898.

[4] I find myself underlining-: it is not Rodin whose voice makes this emphasis. But I am attempting to mark out in this way the formulas which spring up in his conversation, and which, collected together, will give the public an idea of his instinctive synthesis, deduced from life.

[5] The word _exalté_ has in this use no precise equivalent in English. "Enthusiast," as the eighteenth century knew the word--that is, with the infusion of a touch of lunacy--conies perhaps nearest.--TRANS.

[6] An observation noted by Mlle. Judith Cladel in her curious volume, _Rodin, drawn from life._ (Éditions de La Plume, 1903.)

[7] Loïe Fuller has obtained, by means of stuffs not wetted, the effects that the 'École' loves, because her plastic dance is logically derived from nature.

IV

WORKS SINCE THE "BALZAC"--SMALL WORKS IN MARBLE--PLAN OF THE MONUMENT TO LABOUR--DRAWINGS AND ETCHINGS

"I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door-post, _Whim._ I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation.... Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist ... must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must inquire if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of our own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world."

I quoted these high-minded words of Emerson's to Rodin at the time of the _Balzac_ incident. "They are," I said to him, "the very epigraph of your whole life." Nor have they ceased to epitomise the man and the artist. From the time of the _Balzac_ Rodin's work has proceeded very regularly and on the same principles. The _Victor Hugo_ is being finished in marble, in its two versions, in the studio of the Rue de l'Université. The group in which Hugo, his extended arm commanding silence of the waves, sits surrounded by Muses is almost ready; the other, in which Hugo, dreamily listening to the counsels of Iris, stands on the edge of a rock washed by waves, amid which Nereids are entwined, is not quite so far advanced. _The Gate of Hell_ is ready to receive its finally chosen and ordered figures. In the Salon of 1902 Rodin exhibited the three _Shades_ from its summit, inspired by the celebrated _Lasciate ogni speransa._ In 1900 Rodin only showed two or three old productions at the Universal Exhibition, because his work was collected in a special pavilion at the Rond-point de l'Alma, the concession of which pavilion was made uncomfortable for him by his colleagues, so much so that the artist was obliged to remove on the very day of closing, with less delay and consideration allowed to him than to the most unimportant industrial exhibitor. This special exhibition was, nevertheless, a great international success for Rodin, and the amazing development of his fame may be said to date from it. Before 1900 Rodin stood in the position of an exceptional artist, celebrated but envied, isolated and challenged, whose relations with the Government were strained, whom a minority upheld, but on whom the official world looked coldly. Since that time his eminence is so firmly established that he now holds the rank that Puvis de Chavannes held in the estimation of all artists. His triumphant journey to Prague (1901-2), London's enthusiastic reception, and Rodin's recent election to be President of the Society over which Whistler presided, have finally given him the acknowledgment so long looked for. In 1903 his marble bust of Hugo aroused enthusiasm, and at the Salon of 1904 the colossal bronze _Thinker_ had a most flattering reception, and disarmed the last of his former detractors.

A woman's bust accompanied _The Thinker_ to the Salon. Rodin, who does portraits now and again, had previously made an admirable one of Mme. Fenaille, wife of the art-patron who had been of such great service to him; and he is attempting a curious variation of it. He has just finished a bust of a helmeted Minerva, as impressive as a Donatello, and this, too, is a portrait.